tracing our steps forward
by TolkienGirl
Summary: Dean's gone through enough memories tonight. (Post 12x02, Sam helps Dean sort through some of what they're facing in the new world order. Absolutely no slash, just brotherly love. Warning for mentions of suicidal thoughts.)


**A/N: I don't think Mary will play favorites, but Dean has never been the most reliable narrator when it comes to his self-worth.**

He lines up the beer bottles and thinks of Dad, thinks of squinting half because of concentration and half because of the blinding crisscross of sunrays in his eyes. Dean's hunched over on kitchen tile, listening to the refrigerator hum steadily in the thick quiet, but in his mind he can hear the quick shatter of another bottle hit. Bullet blast, buried in remembrances.

One after the other after the other.

(Six, maybe seven. That would make it two, maybe three years, since she'd been gone.)

Dean rifles through the photographs one more time. He's changed, of course. But she hasn't.

She couldn't have.

He just isn't remembering quite right.

"Dude," Sam says, and flicks on the main light. Dean's been sitting in the near dark, but somehow Sam knew he was there.

"Go back to bed, Sam," Dean says, like Sam isn't a grown man who's got three inches on him. "You need to rest up."

"Cas put me back together."

"Still."

"What are you doing?"

Dean stands up. If he doesn't, Sam will join him on the floor, long legs scrunched up, trying to fold himself into too-small spaces, as always. It will remind Dean of when they were kids, side-by-side in the back of the Impala.

Dean's gone through enough memories tonight.

So now they're leaning against opposite counters. Dean has the pictures in his hand and the beer bottles at his feet. Sam is silent for a long moment, taking it all in. Deciding, Dean supposes, whether he's going to say anything about what he sees.

"Long day," is what Sam comes up with, at last.

"Yeah."

"Is something bothering you?"

And just like that, Dean can't meet his eyes. Dean doesn't deserve that privilege, being bothered by something about this situation. He doesn't want to be bothered by it. And like always, he barely knows how to begin to explain. "Every damn day, Sam, since that night. I've seen her face in my head every day. In heaven, purgatory, hell—God, the worst—" he stops short. He was about to say, _the worst is when the demons looked like her_ , but he doesn't, and there's something in the sympathetic tightening of Sam's mouth that tells him, Sam already knows.

Sam went to hell too.

Sam wraps his hands around the edge of countertop that runs behind him, leans back. "None of us know how to deal with it."

"Huh." Dean's noncommittal. There's things about this that maybe he can't even say out loud to Sam, like how Sam has grown up to be polite and smart and capable, whereas Dean used up all his charm too early, scamming and shifting and trying to make ends and endings meet. Surely, if she lasts long enough, if this isn't all some terrible, terrible trick, Mom will see that.

"We've wanted this all our lives," Sam says. His voice is a little husky, a little emotional. Typical Sam. That makes Dean's heart clench up, just like it always does. Every time they're safe again, he's shaken and warmed by it for days.

"Exactly," Dean says. He wasn't lying when he told Mom that he was happy. "It's just—she's a human being. And Dad—Dad always treated her like an angel. Not like a real angel, but what we always thought angels were. I did too. And that's not fair to her. Like, I don't get to fit her into some freakin' category, just because—" His sentences are short, broken. "what if she has a bad day, Sam? I can't hold that against her. What if I screw up and—"

"You're not going to screw this up, Dean." The edge in Sam's tone is all Sam-at-fourteen again, edges and anger and blistering loyalty. Except when Sam was fourteen, Dean didn't admit his inner thoughts out loud unless one of them thought they were dying.

Some things do change, maybe.

"You don't know that," Dean mumbles. There's a part of him that is overcome with relief, seeing his smile on his mom's face, catching little flickers of _sameness_ between them, and then there's a part of him that sees Sam—so much like Dad, so sharp and strong and brilliant—and thinks, _of course she'll love him best._

"I thought you were dead, again." Sam is starting to move around the kitchen. He made tea for Mom before, and now he's making tea for them. Dean thinks throwing it in a nearby harbor would be more appropriate, given their whole run-in with the nasty British chick, but Sam can do as he pleases.

"I know."

Sam pauses, cradling two cardboard cartons in his hands. "Every time I think you're dead, or know you're dead, or whatever, I want to die too." He clears his throat. There's crap Sam isn't telling him yet, because Dean's sure that the burns and gashes and bruises, all of which Cas healed, aren't the only scars he's bearing. But Sam, Dean knows, will always want to tackle someone else's problems first.

"I know we've died before," Sam says. That's normal, for them. They're too many miles past weird to even give it a second thought. Dean just waits for Sam to finish. "But seeing Mom—back. It just reminded me. You were a kid, but you probably spent a lot of time wishing you would die, too. Just to be with her again. I never really—lost her, you know? I never had her in the first place. But you…"

And it's times like this, Dean wonders if Sam even gets it all. "I didn't want to die, dumbass," Dean says, but he says it affectionately, hiding whatever's probably showing through his eyes by leaning over to pick up the beer bottles.

He's not seven anymore, holding a gun that's too heavy, looking up at his father.

"You didn't?"

There's the Sammy guidance counselor voice, rather like the guidance counselors who used to catch sight of his scars and ask him if he was self-harming. And then he used to say, _Are you freakin' serious?_ And now he thinks it's more like, _not where you can see_.

"I had you, Sam," he growls. "I wanted Mom back, every single day, but—I had _you_." Until the times he didn't, and yes, then Dean Winchester nearly put a bullet in his brain a few times, but Sam doesn't need to hear about that.

"OK," Sam says. He hasn't made much headway with the tea. Now he's just standing there, small mugs in his big hands, but his eyebrows are all pulled together like they were when he was learning how to read. "I guess…look, Dean. I think our problem—and Mom's too, probably, is we just have too much to say. And some of it sucks." He meets Dean's eyes again. "But some of it—I mean, everything ends, for us, but sometimes the beginnings are pretty damn good."

"Not all the endings are bad either," Dean counters. He puts the teakettle on the stove. Hell, if Dad could see them now. Drinking tea. But Dad isn't here, and somehow, Dean's at peace with that.

"Right," Sam says. "I just don't want you to feel like you need to smooth all of it over, make sense of it all. Man, you deserve some happiness. So just—this is good, and it's real, and I think the universe decided to just…give us one."

"Seems hard to believe."

"You've got to have a little faith," Sam says, and smiles. Dean knows that smile better than he knows his own.

 _Of course_ , he realizes, suddenly. Of course Mom will love Sam best. Because she and Dean are just alike.


End file.
